"The ancient pueblo of Acoma is well-nicknamed: Known as the Sky City, it commands the most exotic location of any inhabited place in the United States -- the top of a 370-foot-high mesa in New Mexico, a natural citadel of golden rock, an island in the sky.

It's also amazingly well- disguised.

I'd driven there from Albuquerque in late afternoon, turning south off Interstate Hwy. 40 at the Acoma tribe's booming casino complex and picking up a small, scenic road. At first, it ran past scattered homesteads -- old stone houses, trailers, a few brand-new ranch homes -- but for most of its nearly 20 miles, it took me through a gorgeously empty landscape of red and gold mesas, polka-dotted with plump, dark cedar shrubs.

Finally, the road curved, and the vista I was waiting for opened out above a wide valley, studded with mesas and giant rock towers, like sentinels along a sacred way."

Get the Story:
Island in the sky (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 8/14)
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If you go: Acoma Pueblo (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 8/14)